What is the past, present, and future of scientific research on the Yellow River Basin? —A bibliometric analysis

China's Yellow River Basin (YRB) has large watershed but scarce water resources. More importantly, most parts of the YRB are located in semi-arid areas of Northwest China, where the ecology and environments are fragile. So, ecological restoration and agricultural production always are the key research topics of the YRB. However, the specific research interest of YRB changed over time and was always closely related to the implementation of government policies. Hence, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of YRB's research topics based on the methods of bibliometrics. The results showed that the number of papers about YRB’s research experienced a change from slowly increasing (1998–2010, 83 papers) to rapidly increasing (2011–2015, 128 papers), and then to exponentially rising (2016–2020, 369 papers). Secondly, the main research fields of the YRB included farming, crops, water, soil, environment, and etc. The journal of Agriculture Water Management had the highest global total citations and H-index, even local cited references were the highest among all of the reference papers about the YRB. Through summarizing the most cited papers and references, we found the most important research hotspots about the YRB were: the impacts of climate change and human activities on the amount of sediment in the YRB, the management of soil erosion and vegetation restoration in the YRB, and the relationship between crops and environment and management in the Loess Plateau of China. In addition, “Loess Plateau” was the most frequent keyword in the past ten years and the popularity of “climate change” rose sharply in the past five years. For YRB’s research in near future, how to effectively control carbon emissions, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and carbon surplus is becoming an important implication for YRB's agricultural production and ecological restoration in the future. In general, this research is expected to promote a comprehensive and quantitative understanding of the past, present and future of YRB’s research.